Andrew Beeston is the gun graphic designer who won Sydneyanglicans.net’s inaugral ‘Stitched Up’ t-shirt design competition. Meet the man inside the shirt and his ambitions to serve his Christian community…

How did it feel to win the t-shirt contest?

Felt good, though I thought the Two Salty girls would win. I really liked their shirt and I thought more people would go for theirs.

How did you start in design?

I was 17 in 1998 and I was leading the youth group at church. I was doing a Bachelor of Arts at the time. I thought we could really do with a website. I went about trying to design a site. A friend from church showed me how. In my first attempt I used Microsoft Word to do it and it was horrible. He sent it back and said "it's the most disgusting thing I have ever seen'.

I have never studied design or computers formally. I was always doodling, and never considered doing it for a living. Everything I do is self-taught. I really got into design. I worked out why I wanted to do it. It's to reflect God's beauty in everything.

How did you get into the industry?

The same guy who thought my work was terrible " Rod Haywood, who is at church with me at St Phillip's, Eastwood " he offered me a job for a couple of weeks during the uni holidays. It was the first time I had worked in that business. A series of jobs kept popping up that I didn't really ask for but kept getting, like working at an e-learning company for a yea, after going for an interview that I didn't really want to do.

Tell us about Brown Box?

It's a company I started with a friend of mine, Rob Lincoln, one year ago. Started off as a loose agreement to do work together and formalised a year ago so we could work together. He is trained in Multimedia at Macquarie Uni.

We provide online solutions for businesses. Could range from a web page advertising a service, to a full blown e-commerce web site. We are currently working on a client's site who is selling opals.

What is Brown Box's ethos?

The ethos is that eventually we will be working for companies, helping them do their business on line. We are making money so other people can have it. We give away a lot of our profits. We give a significant proportion to TEAR Australia. That's why we formalised our agreement to work together, so we could benefit others. That could be done in any industry but we chose the web. 

What makes Brown Box unique?

The values we have are working towards helping others and seeing God's kingdom grow through helping TEAR Australia. That's why we like to work for ourselves, rather than working for someone else who will spend money on more houses and cars.

As a company, we focus on serving the client first. We want to solve their problems. We're not there just to make a buck.

Is there a five-year plan?

We are working that out at the moment. Essentially, we want to build up the company so we can easily support other people. Don't know if it will stay a boutique, or become a huge company, but we want to continue to provide better services for people online. It's there but it's not quite there.

The web is such a saturated industry, it’s important that we become more known.

Do you have personal goals?

I want to effect the way people do things from the top. I have a website called www.niphal.com. I have been running that for two or three years. The goal of my work is to show people through the website that Christians can design and are relevant in their work.

I really want to encourage other Christians who want to get into the design area that you don't have to do a half-baked job. I want people to know that God's work exceeds, and so if we are God's people we should exceed too. Christians can be some of the best designers and show God's beauty through their work. I want to do this through my work and encourage other Christians.

What's a typical day for Andrew Beeston?

We are always doing something different and its hard sometimes to even do the work. It sometimes feels like we have so many meeting talking to clients, it feels like we don't actually achieve much in a day.

We work in a home office (Rob's house). When we get in, we start the day with prayer and a passage from the Bible, and we ask God to do his work through our work. We generally organise our day into meetings or work in the office.

Rob and I work in separate rooms. I usually have my earphones on while staring at two computers all day, listening to U2 while typing and coding and designing. When I do get down to it, that's what I love doing.

Contact: [url=http://www.brownbox.net.au]http://www.brownbox.net.au[/url] / Andrew@brownbox.net.au